I became the Leadership Editor of Forbes in December 2008, just as the American business world was crashing down and taking the jobs and homes of millions with it. Had I started the job a year or two earlier, I might have found that covering things like how to be a manager, corporate strategy, risk management, governance, and corporate social responsibility was worthy but possibly sometimes a little dull. Now I found that my beat was everything that had gone terribly wrong and was going to have to go very right to get us all back to prosperity. Since then, I've had the pleasure of publishing some of the world's best minds on every aspect of leadership.
Previously I was a senior editor of Forbes magazine, and before that I was for many years the managing editor of American Heritage and the editor of the quarterly Invention & Technology. I've emceed the annual induction ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, done the play-by-play over the P.A. system on a cruise ship as it passed through the Panama Canal, and written on the history of bourbon whiskey and the making of Steinway pianos, among many, many other things. I prepared for all that by majoring in music in college and writing a senior thesis on the music of Hector Berlioz.
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In the days since the election we have learned that President Barack Obama‘s campaign had an amazingly advanced and disciplined ground game that knew just what precincts and even voters to target and how to target them, based on polling information that predicted how the vote was going with uncanny precision. Yet Mitt Romney was the man running as the experienced manager, the man whose years running a business uniquely qualified him to run the biggest, most complex organization on earth, the federal government. That was his main, most consistent claim to the office. Now it looks more as if, though he may have been very good at buying and selling companies and extracting profit from them, he wasn’t nearly as good at heading an effective complex organization as President Obama.

Obama executed quantifiable long-term plans, adaptable short-term planning, an innovative GOTV initiative and plotted better ad strategies, while Romney had the ORCA trainwreck [see below], inaccurate internal polling, poorly informed managers and insufficient fiscal planning (e.g. coffers too low in July to react to the Obama ad blitz seems so minor league!). Not to mention its upper management was rewarded with bonuses in September, right after the languid convention and the embarrassing European trip.

The blogger Allahpundit has a very good post about the difference in the organizational success of the campaigns, in which he writes,

This was supposed to be Romney’s strength, the reason to prefer him to Gingrich, Santorum, etc. Even if he didn’t always seem so “severely conservative,” he could be trusted to hold his own against Team Hopenchange in a battle of the ground games. After all, that’s his brand — he’s a managerial genius. If anyone could build a company capable of capturing the presidency, he could.

Allahpundit cites a Romney campaign worker’s account of Project Orca, which the campaign described as “a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.” It involved using smartphones on election day to figure out which precincts weren’t producing enough voters, so help could be rushed to them to turn out the vote. But it was incompetently set up and planned for and was a wreck on election day, and according to that campaign worker:

the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. . . . If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

Here’s how Jonathan Last, who writes often for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, puts it:

There was, to my mind, only one qualitative argument generally made in favor of Romney: that his management experience made him uniquely qualified to be president. He was a “turn-around artist.”A “genius CEO.” . . . At least this was a falsifiable claim. And the fact that Romney could not master even his own campaign organization in order to win an incredibly winnable election demonstrates–incontrovertibly–that it wasn’t true. If he was a turn-around artist, he would be president-elect right now.

Most political campaigns aren’t invalidated by a loss. A candidate puts forward an idea or a worldview and it can stand whether or not it’s embraced by voters. It has its own truth. But in the wake of his loss Romney’s campaign now looks ludicrous. He simply can’t be a “genius” of managing and salvaging and not win.

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an organization is an organization whether its private business or a political campaign. You put together a good team and have good communication and honesty about whats happening with the project and with some luck most times good results happen.

Romney’s loss wasn’t due to just the voters choosing Obama over him on issues…there were organizational deficiencies that very well may have cost him the election more than issues.

* Team Romney disregarded the polling that showed him losing and only dealt with polling that was favorable. Had they taken all the polling honestly maybe he could have targeted those regions and areas that had him behind much better all he needed was a couple of percentage points or less in a number of them. That translates to a few thousand per state but more directly a few hundred per district and a few dozen per area in that district. Once you knock it down to that point youre talking about a couple of campaign workers persuading 20 people or so in a given spot to vote for Romney. If ORCA was supposed to facilitate that there ample evidence why that didn’t happen. Not a message or platform issue problem but an organizational one.

* Team Romney had on average less offices in the battle ground state than Obama. And had them up and running much later than Obama. from Dailykos:

Here is the side by side comparison of campaign offices in swing states, according to the latest totals posted on the candidates’ respective websites. In parenthesis, you will see how many each candidate has added or subtracted since the last update.

Again not a message or platform issue problem but an organizational one.

There’s more but when you look at it closely Team Romney’s organization was slipshod compared to Obama’s and this was Romney’s second time doing this after learning from his mistakes the first time and Mccain’s.

When was the last time you – or Mitt Romney – ran the Government of the United States of America and – get this Barry – were re-elected President by the majority of Americans with an “Electoral College Landslide”….?

Obama had 6 years to organize his campaign. Romney had 18 months. Obama had more paid volunteers than Romney who used untrained unpaid volunteers. Obama got fewer Electoral Votes than in 2008 and got 7 million fewer votes than Romney. If you judge a person on their leadership you look at their accomplishments and failures. Romney clearly accomplished more in 18 months in organizing a campaign than Obama.

Obama had 6 years to organize his campaign. Romney had 18 months. Obama had more paid volunteers than Romney who used untrained unpaid volunteers. Obama got fewer Electoral Votes than in 2008 and got 7 million fewer votes than in 2008 Romney got more than McCain. If you judge a person on their leadership you look at their accomplishments and failures. Romney clearly accomplished more in 18 months in organizing a campaign than Obama.

While I agree that Romney fell hard, I also felt like he was really fighting two battles: one against Obama and the other against his own party. I don’t understand why he had to cater to so much to the radical right-wing for the primaries. What they needed was a moderate and though the Republican Machine made it abundantly clear they wanted a severe conservative I find it difficult to believe that they didn’t know such a candidate would undoubtedly lose. Romney, more centrist than all the rest of the crop this year was far and away their best choice. Having him focus first on being ultra-conservative then try to be more moderate makes him look weak the way he was so obviously trying to please all the people all the time.

It’s also sad that all the shouting all the time from the radical right drowns out those who are moderate Republicans. If you’re a Republican you’re either 100% for the system or they will make it seem that you are 100% against it and shut you out. That is a huge problem of theirs: there’s no room for any other voice, any other side to an issue. In such a culture is it any wonder that Romney was forced to play their game? Maybe if the Republicans actually got behind him and let Romney be Romney they would’ve won this election.

The Orca disaster is like a Keystone Cops version of how not to roll out a crucial data project. Ars Technica has a good breakdown of the breakdown. Stike that, it could only have been a ‘breakdown’ if it had ever worked. And it didn’t, except in virtualized testing. In reality, super-manager-CEO-turned politician Mitt Romney oversaw one of the most buffoonishly amateurish software roll outs ever.

And then, there’s everything else. But I’m a data/info guy and this one really stuck in my craw.

Except for one thing, I was already for the other side, anyway.

But, as a data professional, I hate to see a good idea (well, an idea that the Obama team already had, but a good idea, nonetheless) ruined by bad planning and worse management.

And that certainly was the case.

That said, I don’t want to give the die-hard fabulists of the far economic right any straws to grab at. It wasn’t just incompetence that sunk the Romney effort.

It was, in large part, that US citizens have begun to realize that the core policies of today’s GOP only worsen our economic plight and, paradoxically, when pursued, follow the sad pattern of past Republican presidential administrations into bigger deficits and more debt.

I grew up Republican and I still can’t quite resolve the pathetic economic history of the party’s presidents with the rousing rhetoric of small government and self-reliance I grew up with.

What you say may be true but regardless the country, or half of, elected a President who cannot be trusted to do anything but attack and want to destroy our America to a questionable point of ever seeing our majestic power again? We know he is a professional liar, bigot, despot and he will finally fail when he lies to Israel! He and his minions will be sitting on the sidelines when the army of 200 million starts to war with Israel and the world will see a major defeat of all of the cannibl nations by the might of the mighty Lord God! Jerusalem will be the throne of the Jesus the world had thought to be gone forever! Glory to my Savior Jesus Christ of Nazareth!